the Plantation Manager, Robert A. Macfie, Jr. This is often credited as Hawaii's first railway. While field railways ran on “literally little more than panels of snap-track laid and re-laid across the fields as the seasonal cutting progressed,” more permanent right-of-ways were soon established to provide freight and passenger service from mills to ports, where raw sugar was packed aboard ocean-going ships bound for California refineries. An engineer, sent to Kauai from Honolulu in 1898, took the train from Waimea, on the coast, to the Kilauea Plantation's Kekaha mill, situated in the midst of the cane fields, and he described the trip: The railroad is a cute affair, only 30 inch gauge—cars mostly flat for hauling cane and sugar in bags….All cars are no more than 4 feet wide….Engines… are regular toys—they weigh about eight tons….[We] bowled over the four miles of toy railroad to the headquarters of the Plantation….They have engineer only—no fireman—no breakman. No breaks on cars. First railway on the Big Island On Hawaii island (known as the Big Island), a larger railway was also under construction, with the first tracks being laid in March 1881 in Māhukona, North Kohala; its official charter of Incorporation under the name of The Hawaiian Railroad Company was granted in July 1880. The Hawaiian Gazette reported that of track had been laid in September 1881, but its unofficial opening was in March 1882. The New York Times, however, reported that the first steam railway was to be built on the Big Island in 1899, which may be a misunderstanding based on financial reorganization of the existing railways. Initial railways in Oahu and Maui The Hawaiian Gazette, in the same 1882 issue that it mentions the initial freight hauling by steam on the Big Island, also states that on Maui, the “Kahului railroad has met all the requirements for transporting freight.” Although one source claims that Oahu did not enter the railway age until 1889, it appears that Oahu had a field railway using the engine Olomana in 1883. Grove Farm Plantation The preservation of steam locomotives on Kauai is largely due to the Grove Farm Sugar Plantation Museum, led by Mabel and Elsie Wilcox, nieces of George Norton Wilcox, who bought Grove Farm Plantation in 1864. The sisters fought to preserve the trains when the Koloa Plantation was taken over by Grove Farm Plantation in 1947 and later when the trains